


The Long Fuse

by mllemaenad



Series: Joanna Hawke [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 21:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3624486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllemaenad/pseuds/mllemaenad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week or so before The Last Straw.</p><p>Fire should unite a city ... but Kirkwall rarely behaved like a normal city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Fuse

Hawke patted the ragged, soot-stained man carefully on the shoulder, and moved to Aveline’s side.

 

“Well, Hawke? What have you got for me?” She sounded even gruffer than usual, although that might only have been the smoke that had got into her throat and lungs. In any case, she had good reason to be short tempered: neither she nor anyone else here had slept in more than thirty-six hours.

 

“There’s what I know, and there’s what I can prove,” Hawke told her, although she could guess exactly how well this would go over with _Guard Captain_ Aveline. “No one here will make an official statement to the guard. You know that. Half of them are Coterie. The rest … have their own reasons for laying low.”

 

True to form, Aveline grunted in disgust. “Sometimes I think this city wants to suffer. I don’t suppose it would help if I put it about that the guard has bigger problems than arresting smugglers and pickpockets today?”

 

Hawke let her silence speak for her. Sometimes Aveline just needed to vocalise how she _wished_ things worked. She already knew how they really did. She didn’t need anyone to tell her.

 

Aveline sighed. “All right, then. What do you know?”

 

“There were five, perhaps six men down here that night,” Hawke said carefully. “Well spoken, but dressed like workman. Not as inconspicuous as they thought they were. And … several people said they’d seen them before. In Templar armour.”

 

“Templars? That’s serious, Hawke. How sure are they?”

 

“They’re smugglers, Aveline.” Varric’s voice came from somewhere around Hawke’s elbow. “Who do you think buys all that lyrium?”

 

“Have you heard the same, then?” asked Aveline. Hawke thought she looked about ready to start strangling answers out of people – a tactic that might work better if they weren’t half choked with smoke to begin with.

 

“More or less.” Varric shrugged. “Everyone spotted the not-nearly-shady-enough-for-Darktown crowd. Some of them say they recognised them as Templars. A few of them say they were fighting demons or blood mages. A few others say the Templars were in full armour and used lit arrows to start it. This one guy says it was a dragon, but I wouldn’t take him too seriously. I think he actually _liked_ inhaling all that smoke.”

 

“With the mood in this city? A dragon would be the _better_ option,” said Aveline darkly.

 

The fire had started after nightfall, though _when_ exactly, was difficult to say. It should have been the screams that alerted the city, but even the guard rarely responded to death and mayhem in Darktown. Instead it was the smoke – foul, roiling columns that came up through disused mineshafts, half-clogged drains and the chimneys of ancient, buried buildings and all but smothered Lowtown.

 

The elves had rallied first. Darktown was Kirkwall’s underbelly, and everyone knew that a knife in the guts was a slow, painful way to go. The alienage, built on tunnel-ridden land no one else would touch, would be the first to succumb – but if too much of the Undercity burned, half of Kirkwall would collapse in on itself. Hightown might survive, more or less, but who would feed all those nobles and wealthy merchants if all the servants and labourers were dead?

 

They’d struggled on alone until Hawke, backed by a glowering Aveline and her guardsmen, had used her authority as Champion to bully the human population into joining the bucket chain. A dozen mages with ice on their fingertips might have done wonders, but the official position was that they were all still confined to their quarters, and no word had come down from the Circle. Fire should _unite_ a city – it was the one thing that hurt everybody equally – but Kirkwall rarely behaved like a normal city.

 

The damage had been terrible. Darktown was bad air and rotten wood, sewage and rags – and hidden caches of smuggled goods, including highly flammable lyrium. It usually felt dark, damp and cold, but once the fire had got started it had found plenty of fuel.

 

There was no way to count the deaths. Who even knew how many people lived down there? Some had fled out early on, but many Darktown folk would have regarded the guard patrols of the upper city with as much terror as they would the fire. Some might have fled deeper into the old mines, but that was a sure way to get yourself killed even on a good day. Hawke herself had been frantic, until Bodahn had arrived, red faced and puffing, with the news that Master Anders had come home via the cellar – and that he’d brought company.

 

“There’s one thing we do know,” Hawke said. “We know where it started.”

 

It was hard to be precise with fire: it up ate evidence along with lives and property. This was the edges, where they had finally begun to push the flames back – now occupied by survivors constructing new shelters from ragged sheets and rubble. There were places further in that were still too hot to bear.

 

You could get a rough sense of the beginning from this, by tracing the damage back to its centre, but Hawke didn’t need to rely on that. She had testimony she trusted, and the evidence of her own eyes.

 

“We were all paid up,” Varric insisted, vehemently. “Templars, Coterie, Carta. Half a dozen other gangs big enough to run protection rackets. Everyone with an interest in the area.”

 

Hawke shrugged. “I think we’re past that now, Varric. And not every Templar can be bribed.”

 

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Aveline, sounding pained. That Hawke and Varric conspired in various less-than-legal ways to steer unwelcome attention of various sorts away from Merrill, Anders and Fenris was an open secret, but it was one she preferred not to share.

 

“Not one word,” Hawke agreed peaceably, but Varric scowled.

 

“Mages and Templars, Templars and mages,” he said. “How many more people have to die before they sort themselves out?”

 

Hawke turned away. She loved Varric – with Carver dead and Bethany gone he was the closest thing to a sibling she had left – but there were some subjects she could not broach with him. Varric liked everyone, and he was good at making people get along. He held the standing record for keeping Anders and Fenris from each other’s throats (a little over three hours), and there were days when Hawke thought that if you put him in a room with Knight-Commander Meredith and a blood mage, he’d have them playing cards and swapping tales in under a minute. If the world was full of Varrics, there would be no Circles, no fighting, and the Chant would have a lot more sex and swearing in it. But it wasn’t, and Hawke could see no way out of this mess that didn’t involve more bloodshed.

 

“I’ll carry on,” she said.

 

“If you find anyone who’ll stand as witness, you come straight to me,” Aveline told her. “Whoever did this, whoever gave the order – it cannot go unanswered.” Still, she looked unhappy. She hadn’t been kidding about the dragon.

 

Hawke picked her way carefully through the rubble. She’d put on old clothes from her refugee days, and borrowed one of Isabela’s scarves to protect her hair from ash and filth – a fair trade, she thought, considering the things Bela did to her dresses. Most people didn’t recognise her unless she spoke to them; some, not even then. Earlier it had been useful to be the Champion, in full armour with her bow on her back, stalking through the streets and pulling soft merchants quite literally into line. Now she just wanted to be Hawke, and move through the passageways unseen.

 

Opinion in Darktown was divided. There was general agreement – at least from the gang leaders, who would know – that Templars were responsible. If there were apostates still in the city, then they were here – in the employ and under the protection of Kirkwall’s innumerable mercenary organisations and criminal gangs. About half the population was outraged; it was one thing for them to go after sympathisers in the city proper – but the Undercity had its own rules, and apostates were a useful resource. Half thought that if the mages had just stayed in their Circle like they were supposed to, none of this would have happened. Tempers were often high in Darktown, and today it was probably only general exhaustion that prevented a full-scale riot.

 

She found Anders kneeling in the little room they’d cleared for his work. A thousand years ago a guard or overseer might have used it, to store his things and put his feet up while slaves laboured in the mine shafts around him. It had a little window through which a little patch of sky could be glimpsed – the air was cleaner here, and there was no need to light torches to see. Even with the cold wind coming in off the harbour, no one wanted a fire today.

 

Hawke watched Anders’s shoulders tense at the sound of approaching footsteps, then slump wearily when he saw her face. There were few patients here for him to defend. The walking wounded were gone: off to find out if their friends, family or employers were still alive. Only the ones so badly burned that even magic might not save them were left. They were sleeping now, or unconscious – if they hadn’t succumbed while she was away.

 

“Just me,” she said, with a wan smile. Then she was close enough to look over his shoulder, and realised why he was on the ground in the first place.

 

There was a little cat stretched out on its side before him. It was a tabby, painfully thin, its fur scorched in several places. It was also too stiff and still to still be living. Hawke hoped desperately that it wasn’t the one Anders had been courting with bits of fish and saucers of milk; the one that would bump its head against his ankles but still skittered away when he tried to pick it up. _“Needs more time,”_ Anders had said, but they were all out of that. Even if this wasn’t _his_ cat – what were the odds that it had survived?

 

“Poor little bugger,” Anders said. “She escaped the flames, but she breathed too much smoke. In all this mess, who notices a cat in pain?”

 

“I’m sorry, love,” Hawke murmured. She settled her hands on his shoulders, and he let his head fall back against her as though he was too tired to hold it upright.

 

“You see how it is?” he said grimly, looking up. “They don’t care who they kill, as long as there is no mage in Kirkwall left alive and free.”

 

“I see,” she told him, simply.

 

That provoked a bitter laugh. “Preaching to the choir, I know. But no one else seems to listen.”

 

Hawke tightened her grip on his shoulders, her presence the only reassurance she could offer. Anders had foregone the thick black coat he’d taken to wearing lately and was working in his shirtsleeves. It made sense – burning feathers would have done nothing to improve the situation – but it made him look strangely unarmoured. Usually he was only this undressed when they were safely at home.

 

“Aveline will investigate,” she said. “She’s fighting mad.”

 

“Is that so? That’s two bits of sense I’ve had from her in a week. At this rate we’ll be having slumber parties and baking cookies together in no time.”

 

Hawke snickered. “Maker, don’t stir her up. Besides – isn’t that what we call it when everybody passes out in Varric’s suite?”

 

“No, sweetheart, we call that _Friday_.”

 

They grinned at each other, giddy with exhaustion, until Anders looked down at the still, furry body again. Laughing in the face of ruin, with the dead and the dying around them. Well, they’d done stranger things to stay sane.

 

“I didn’t see them,” he said then. “I could have done something if I had.”

 

Even looking down from above, Hawke caught the way the light crackled briefly across his face as he spoke. _“Justice concurs_ ,” she thought. Even after all these years, she could rarely understand the way the spirit’s mind worked and what his various manifestations really meant. But on the subject of Templars burning out paupers to catch apostates, she thought she could guess what his opinion might be.

 

The fire had started behind the Darktown clinic. More than started – it had _exploded_ , taking out the back wall and crushing a couple of patients to death. Anders had brought the survivors up to Hightown through the old cellar entrance, and sealed it behind him with a barrier of ice magic. Hawke had looked where the cellar door used to be – behind that shimmering blue wall there was nothing but dimly glowing rubble.

 

“What you did saved lives,” Hawke reminded him.

 

“ _This_ did.” Anders tapped a lump beneath his shirt – the key he wore on a string around his neck. “That’s one more thing I owe you, love.”

 

“It’s a bit useless now, I’m afraid,” said Hawke lightly. “We don’t have a door anymore. We barely have a cellar.”

 

“I think I’ll keep it. For luck, if nothing else.” He turned his face up again to look at her – eyes red-rimmed from smoke and weariness, hair so grimy it was more brown than blond. Orana would have nervous fits when she saw him, and probably try to use all the soap and bath salts at once. “What do you think happened?”

 

“I think …” Hawke considered. The city had not fallen in, and Lowtown’s shops would be open tomorrow – some of them were probably open now. The perpetrators were almost certainly, and very conveniently, too dead to be questioned. But things need not have gone that way. “Mad or not, I don’t think Meredith is stupid enough to have ordered this. We might have lost the whole city, and she would answer for that. But I think there are Templars stupid enough to interpret an order to ferret out any sympathisers as this. They’ve been dragging people from their homes in broad daylight.”

 

Anders nodded, accepting this, and Hawke hesitated before speaking again.

 

“But,” she said, carefully. “What did they find that burned so well? They can’t have meant to get caught in the inferno. Was it lyrium?”

 

“No lyrium that I know of. But I had – things stored back there. Supplies. Experiments. Some of it must have had a kick to it.”

 

Anders lied the way a dwarf did magic: so utterly without success that you wondered if he even understood the concept properly. That it wasn’t lyrium Hawke believed; the rest was suspect. She looked warily around the room. They said the Knight-Commander had ears everywhere, but if they were in this room they were burnt, unconscious or dead. Even so, she wouldn’t have risked asking, if not for the fear that if she _didn’t_ she would miss the moment and lose everything.

 

“The word in the Gallows is that they’ve sent for the Right of Annulment,” she said, choosing her words with care. “It could arrive any day. Whatever your plans, we’re almost out of time. I know you won’t give me details. But, Anders, do the Templars know? Is that what this was about?”

 

She was looking him right in the eye, and could almost see the wheels in his head turning like clockwork as he decided how much it was safe to say. “I don’t know,” he told her at last. “If it was, it did them no good.”

 

Hawke sighed, and closed her eyes. For now, at least, she would have to be satisfied with that. “It would be easier to watch your back if I knew where to look for trouble,” she groused, nevertheless. Satisfied did not have to mean happy.

 

“Everywhere,” said Anders, and she felt his shoulders move beneath her hands – something between a shrug and a shudder. “You should go home, love. You haven’t slept.”

 

“No.” Hawke’s eyes snapped open. “That’s not how this works. I thought you’d died down here. I’m not going till you do.”

 

“There are things even you can’t protect me from.” He was wearing the expression that seemed to have arrived in the box with his new coat: at once both intense and faraway. It reminded Hawke too much of the way he kept trying to say goodbye, as though there was only one way this scenario could play out. It frightened her.

 

“I can try,” Hawke retorted. She drew a deep breath. “Besides, there’s too much to do.  I’ll send messengers to the taverns: see if I can get something better than rat stew for these people. And you must need more bandages. We should do something about the bodies, too. A proper pyre, in public. We can at least push this mess in their faces.”

 

They both looked down at the cat again: small and ragged, wretched and ruined, and utterly beyond help. That was Kirkwall – and yet, fools that they were, they carried on.

 

She’d have gone on then: uncovered her hair and sent for her armour, and been the Champion again. Handed out food and kept the thugs off the beggars, overpaid the tavern keepers and complimented any noble who deigned to contribute a few silvers to the effort and – hoped that if she pushed hard enough and did enough favours, people would go to the guard and say the things that everyone already knew.

 

But Anders put his hand over hers, pressed against his shoulder. “Only a little longer,” he said. It might have been a promise or a plea, directed at her or at himself or someone else entirely – but it sounded as though he was reaching for something that was just beyond his grasp.

 

So Hawke sank down beside him, their fingers linked together and her arm about his shoulders – and they stayed as they were, even surrounded by death and rubble, just a little longer.

 

“We’ll make them see,” she murmured, and watched as light flickered again across his face in answer. This time, she couldn’t guess what Justice had to say.


End file.
